Fortress of Lost Worlds (42 page)

Klank grunted with the pain of his own jangling fall to the rock floor, in reaction. “The cat—watch for the cat,” he shouted as he moved warily through the mystical gateway, leaving Luigi alone.

Leone wrenched about to face the snarling temple cat, which took to shadow when it saw the pistols in either hand. Leone cursed and fired one impulsive shot, the ball impacting near enough that the cat scurried away along the wall. But now it was nearer, and Luigi didn’t trust his reflexes.

He leapt out through the invisible portal and into the banquet hall, with a ferocious cry designed to warn Klank of his entrance. There he found the sturdy warrior wrestling with his necromantic assailant, a dagger stabbing again and again into the creature’s revivified flesh.

“Try strangling him!” Klank was screaming. “Your belt—I can’t hold him.”

Luigi set down his pistol and unbuckled his belt, found an opening, caught Fernandez around the neck, and pulled the belt taut through the clasp. He jammed his foot against the Spaniard’s back for leverage. Strained. Gurgled with the effort. Klank stabbed and raked. Fernandez’s cold hand caught Klank by the face, squeezing and twisting.

The cat appeared through the portal in the dim starlight that lanced down through high windows above the gallery.

Klank shrilled a cry and rolled away, clutching his thigh.

The assassin had produced his own knife and driven it home. Luigi ferociously pulled on the belt.

“Christ,” Klank was gasping, watching his own blood flow, stanching it desperately. “He’s got to die—
somehow
he’s got to die.”

The cat prowled toward them as Leone was knocked backward, his grip lost. Klank held the creature at bay with his dagger, but he could not rise, and the temple cat bounded atop him, snaring the dagger wrist with its powerful jaws.

“Klank!”

A scream from the gallery above them—Lola and Valentina had emerged from a doorway, shocked to view the bloody drama.

“Leone—
move
!”
Valentina shrieked, aiming her crossbow.

“Get out of here!” Luigi was screaming. “Can’t you see we’re fighting? Don’t you see what’s happening here?”

Leone was roaring incoherently and sobbing with rage as he drew his sword and began to hack at Fernandez, who tried to rise from the marble floor. He chopped off a hand above the wrist, then the other arm.

All at once—Fernandez’s ear suddenly tore nearly off his head to hang raggedly, leaking dark blood—the valiant LoPresti had shredded one of the familiar’s ears, its effect mirrored on the assassin.

“Die—die—
die
!”
Luigi Leone hacked and slashed at the undying enemy, shredding its body, sending Fernandez’s mustached head bouncing toward a corner. But still the monster refused to submit.

A severed hand crawled up behind Leone to grasp his ankle. He screamed and kicked out wildly, trying to dislodge it.

Valentina saw her opening and fired the bolt. It shattered beside the temple cat, which lurched in surprise and snarled up at the women on the gallery. But then it was backing away toward the double door at the far end of the hall, pulling a door open with its teeth.

The rent segments of Fernandez flowed mystically across the floor in the temple cat’s wake. Luigi gagged to see it, scrabbling on hands and knees toward the body of his
amigo
. He began weeping uncontrollably.

Valentina saw the loathsome head of Fernandez slide by beneath her. It was the one she’d seen before. In the desert. Recognition flashed again.
But who
?
Where
?

Lola screamed behind her. Valentina turned and raised a fending hand to see the woman’s head yanked back sharply by the twining fingers in her long, black hair. Lola struggled madly, the infant wygyll slipping from her cradling arm.

Valentina caught the crying child awkwardly and pulled her pistol at the same time. But there was nothing to aim at. Lola was gone, yanked through a doorway into another hostile space.

Valentina immediately remembered the cats. Silent, quicksilver killers. She stutter-stepped backward, gliding along the gallery rail, avoiding doorways, bolstered by the wheel-lock pistol’s deadly promise. Shushing the infant.

It must be hungry
, she was thinking.

Then her thoughts turned from hunger to violent death. She fought back her fears, composed a quiet prayer. She could hear Lola’s screams echoing in some distant chamber of the magical chaos that had been made of the castle.

When she looked below, Leone, too, was gone. And with him, the segmented body of the assassin whose identity she knew she should remember.

* * * *

Ahmed sat sipping his remaining water, observing Gonji’s lightning gyrations of the
katana.
The
kata
completed, the samurai burned nervous energy by practicing an amazing variety of rapid draws that froze into gleaming, lethal cuts.

He snicked the Sagami back into its scabbard with a crisp, two-handed motion.

“This is ridiculous,” Gonji said at last, in frustration. “I wish something would
happen
.”

“Perhaps the others will have something to report,” Ahmed proposed encouragingly. “Yet we hear not a sound…”

Gonji exhaled an exasperated breath. “No gatekeeper. No Dark Company. The last thing I expected of this place was that I might die of
boredom
here.”

“Shall we try the gate?”

Gonji shook his head. “I’ve had enough of this. Let’s retrace our steps and see whether anyone else has discovered anything worthwhile.”

Gonji and Ahmed lost their way on the return, stumbling onto the banquet hall, where a scene of stark horror greeted them. Each man they saw was worse off than the last. There were the battered Cardenas and the obviously injured Simon, who leaked blood from a hastily fashioned patch around his ribs and another around his head, where his scalp had been torn open by the cat he’d killed.

But worst of all was the ravaged Klank LoPresti, who lay in the gory pool formed by the score of wounds that had carried him into the Dark Lands.

Gonji’s hand went to his head in helpless agony. “What—the women—did you leave them alone?”

“They were safe enough when we left them,” Cardenas explained.

“We watched a steady stream of assassins tramp through the ward,” Simon told him impatiently. “It seemed time to do something about it.”

They exchanged what news they could, and then Cardenas seized their joint attentions.

“All right,” he began, spreading his strange map on the floor beneath his taper light. “All right,
senor
samurai, let’s talk architecture and mathematics and for the moment lay thoughts of magic aside. You’ll recall I once told you that my early studies at the university concentrated in mathematics. I remembered theories—silly geometric games, actually, at least that’s what we thought—concerning
manifold
structures—”

“Manifold?”

“
Si—
multidimensional surfaces. Now look—” He fumbled out a deck of playing cards from a pocket. “Don’t know why I kept these. The deck is three cards short. But perhaps it was providential. Now watch…” He fashioned a small house of cards, then collapsed it. “Where have the rooms gone?”

Gonji shrugged. “Nowhere. In the space above. What are you getting at?”

“The space still exists. It was defined by the enclosing surfaces. The surfaces are still there, but the figure has been
enfolded.
Closed inside itself. The walls occupy new dimensions. They don’t exist in ‘our’ space. The spaces are in new containment. Perhaps—perhaps in other
worlds
, coexisting with our own.”

Gonji recalled Domingo’s similarly bizarre talk of alternate worlds. “Go on,” he said to Cardenas grimly.

“This fortress has possibly been so enfolded. From our own world, all that shows is the small block on the surface, where we entered. But we have seen that an entire fortress is indeed contained within that block, all its walls, its apertures intact, by some…unknown manipulation of what we call space. It all occupies a new…arrangement of space.” Cardenas motioned with his hands in a futile effort at delineation. “See my illustration—I’ve tried to display the unfolding of the surfaces our eyes see. Judging by what Simon and I noted, the distortion of the passages
would
be similar to what we’ve experienced.”

“By what magic is this possible?” Sergeant Orozco asked, his brow crinkling. Cardenas could only shrug.

“So how does this help us with our immediate problems?” Gonji asked impatiently.

“It may not,” the educated solicitor admitted, “if this is an individual phenomenon. But if what the witch told you is true—the business of the concurrent worlds, one within another, then there may be a place where they all overlap, a contiguous dimension, one they all touch, from which it all operates. Else—it might all collide. Be destroyed. Universal cataclysm.”

There was silence for a space.

Gonji exhaled heavily. “What do you suggest?”

“That we try to find it.”

“Where?” Buey said.

“At the center, the final place of unfolding. I’d guess…that would be somewhere in the lower reaches of this fortress. We’ve seen little of
them
.”

No one seemed cheered by Cardenas’ observation.

“Then we go on together,” Gonji said slowly, considering. “Downward, somehow, I suppose. But let me remind you of our most immediate need—that of survival. Our enemies could be anywhere now. We must try to find those that still stalk us. And the dead may have an advantage. What one knows, they may all know. Who can say?”

“You speak of magic again,” Cardenas reminded with a smile. “I am talking science and—”

“
Gomen nasai—
so sorry, but
dead men
are indeed stalking and killing us, agreed? Magic or science—it may all be of a piece, somewhere.”

Cardenas shrugged. “Granted.”

“Simon, are you well enough?” Gonji inquired sincerely.

“
Oui
,
no thanks to your leadership, once again.” He smirked crookedly. “There is still Evil about. Let us have done with these…hunters from the grave, one way or the other.”

“
Hai.
I’m afraid, my friends, that there is no gatekeeper, despite my witch friend’s assurances. We must discover our secrets for ourselves. But first…survival.”

“And let us hope and pray,” Ahmed added, showing his parched tongue, “that those secrets include the location of water. And perhaps even a bit of food.”

Gonji’s jaw set, and a thundercloud settled over his features. “You are most honorable warriors, one and all. So sorry, but I must request of you one more service. Let us re-gather the women, and then turn on our predators. Gentlemen—ready your weapons.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Valentina was lost in clutching, enfolding darkness. Dank and musty, with the stench of a tomb. But not silent as a tomb: Something scurried along the walls, seeking her out.

She spat out an angry
tuff
of breath and knelt to steady the pistol, holding the mewling infant close with one arm. For an instant she hated the wygyll babe. What was it to her? What did she care for it? She would abandon it to—

The scurrying feet came closer. She hugged the child tight to her bosom and snarled like an animal. Then what was left of her rational world dissolved with the white pinpoints that glowed in the hole that devoured the wall before her. The wall became a doorway into shepherd’s heaven. A wash of warmer, drier air embraced her like an enfolding mother’s caress.

She saw first the rolling hill, green even in the velvety blackness of a night sky filled with a million cascading stars out of a poet’s dream. The hill was truncated, ending at some indistinguishable distance, a hillock floating in space. The voussoirs of a broken arch loomed up before her. Curving along its apex was a crumbling inscription:

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

And seated with his back against the rear of the arch was a fair-skinned blond man, of indeterminate age, in a tunic, breeches, and sandals.

He turned and gazed at her over his shoulder, surprise fluttering his eyelids. He saw the wheel-lock pistol in her trembling fist.

“Please—there is no violence here. Your baby is crying.”

Valentina was shaking, but the soft spell of peacefulness in the place, something in his alien tone, won her over. She lowered the pistol, looked behind her. The fortress was gone, supplanted by more intoxicatingly scented hills.

“I can’t understand you,” she said. “Do you speak—”

“Ah—Castilian Spanish. The lower worlds.
Si
,
I speak it, along with a hundred other languages and dialects.” He repeated his first words to her.

“It’s not my baby. It is called a… wygyll.”

“You use—an English word. You are a human woman, of the lower orders. I see few…” He seemed to drift into a private reverie a moment, then rose to approach her.

“I need water,” Valentina said flatly. “The baby needs—milk, I suppose?”

He smiled paternally. “And you expect I’ll produce a crude decanter of some sort. And a—lactating bovine beast?” He placed his hands at his chest, then performed a series of hand manipulations at eye level. The sound of rushing water came first, then two gateways opened in the air before him, ground-level, ragged doorway views of placid streams. A gaping Valentina could only process these as the “wounded space” of two other, fanciful worlds. One floral-bordered patch ran with bubbling water; the other—dimmer and emanating a chill breath like morning dew—with a thicker, whitish liquid.

Smiling as one would in response to a waif’s naive wonder, he said, “Yes, sustenance for the child.”

“Are you the…gatekeeper—or an angel?”

“Something between, perhaps. Call it magic, if you will. Many throughout the spheres call us the
Ianitori.
There is no ready explanation within your grasp. You will have to find a way to strain the
lacteus vitae—
you don’t expect me to suckle the child, do you? And please do not hold it so near. I can feel its distress. I am what you might call empathic. Its discomfort is mine.” He moved away and gazed up into the stars, for a time.

Valentina slaked her own thirst, then found the cleanest portion of her caftan to strain the milky fluid for the wygyll babe. The cherub sucked at the fluid serenely.

“If you can feel its distress,” she called at his back, “why don’t you conjure someone to care for it?
I
can’t care for it. It’s not my species.”

“You have no idea of the enormity of what you ask. I must shun involvement as others might shun death. How did you come upon the avian child?” And she began to explain, but his interest drifted instantly, as if he had not asked at all. Then: “Come, see this—the sunset alignment of several enlightened spheres. I have not embraced it with another in longer than I can remember.”

He began to gesture again, and Valentina gasped to see the vast rainbow effect he had conjured, as it seemed she saw a vision of countless suns descending over the multihued horizons of worlds of splendor and beauty.

“All this you can command,” she said in awe, laying the wygyll babe in the spongy grasses. “Have you and the other angels watched us struggle like bugs in a spider’s web, suffering, dying?” Her voice quavered.

“No. I have no idea what you mean. I have no interest at all in the struggles and strife attendant on common human folly.”

But he did seem to show interest. In her. And whether man or god, he possessed male weaknesses she knew well. She postured strong but compliant now, as she moved beside him.

“Yet you did rescue me, and I can only guess at your motive.”

“It was a mistake,” he replied in a tightened voice. “I wandered out farther onto the jetties than I should ever dare. I…felt your terror. I should better have—have—”

“I
am
grateful,” she said, folding her arms under her bosom, not unaware of his fleeting glances. “But I know there’s nothing a mortal can offer a visiting angel in gratitude. I should have died down there if you hadn’t come. What’s your name?”

“Shem,” he answered simply.

“I am Valentina de Corsia. Are you still…a man, like other men?”

Shem ignored her, though he tensed somewhat, yet tried to conceal it.

“See the coruscations on Andelaara 3,” he said, pointing. But when he saw her staring at him, he answered her query. “Like other men, in most ways. I am a Prober.
Ianitori.
A—priest, you might call us. Member of a venerable order, a secret order of adepts who alone can discern the spheres, can enjoy the fullness of Arcadia. Or of what man made of it, in his pride and avarice and dark usage.” This last was spoken bitterly.

“Arcadia?” she wondered aloud. “I’ve heard it mentioned. Isn’t it inscribed on your arch?”

“You speak of it the way all men do, as though it were some handful of earth they might murder their fellows for.
Everything
is Arcadia. Arcadia is all the Architect-god created in his wisdom. Shattered. Dispersed. Irretrievable.”

She felt her influence slipping, attempted a new tack, uncertain as to what she was striving for, but intuiting that unthinkable power flowed through this strange man. Demureness having failed her, causing him to withdraw into a shell of unease and sexual tension, she tried the more earthy approach that had frequently brought university scholars under her spell, though she wished earnestly for some sudden imputation of their great learning.

“Shit—all this power you command, and you use it to flatter yourself with visions of sunsets. As if any man could dare to call them his own!”

He stiffened, seemed about to say something, but held his tongue. Valentina felt herself treading on serpents, but she went on. “You say you felt
my
terror. Have you never felt the horror of a million like me, groveling in some hellish darkness? Preyed on by whatever evil lusts might—
look
at me when I speak to you.
Don’t turn away from me
!”

“You fill me with unaccustomed anger,” he said, as though she’d done him some irreparable harm. “I should never have conducted you here. Leave me!”

“Will you send me back to that dungeon? And the bird-child with me? Think of the suffering souls you might pluck from torment—the infants like that one who’ve died because your magical stream is denied them—god damn it,
how dare you have such power
?!”

She began to cry. Tears of sudden rage she hardly understood drove all artifice before them. She felt a child again, a lonely child unable to cope with the blows of a brutal world.

A look of compassion etched Shem’s face. He winced slightly as he touched her cheek, drawing a single tear close to his eyes.

“You must understand, our most profound vow is to avoid interference in the power games of the spheres. We only observe, try to reorder the keys, repair the jetties of entry, restore the Architect’s original construct. Once, in ages past,
all
sentient beings were able to use the gateways freely. Arcadia was all things to all beings. A unity of multiple worlds. Perfect. Endlessly bountiful. Then there was a great upheaval. Someone, some…cabal of grasping forces, moved by pride, stole the secret for themselves. And Arcadia was withdrawn from its orderly use by all of creation. But as a gesture of hope, the Architect imparts the power over the gateways to some few as they sleep. However, we are forbidden to trifle in individual affairs. With good reason. It would be both pointless and maddening to set any single ill aright, in the light of the overwhelming chaos besetting the spheres of existence. Someone must have tried here, eons ago, when they erected this fortress as a nexus of salient gateways. Their wish was to exert power over numerous spheres by using the gateways from this stronghold. You have seen what resulted. We call it—a local entropy effect. I’m sorry, but I cannot add my hand’s work to this rampant chaos—”

“But you already have,” she argued. “You saved me.
And
the child. And every great goodness starts with one small act.” She wiped her tears. “If you won’t help, then send me back to die with my friends. Only save the wygyll infant. Her mother gave her life for—something.”

He stared at her a long moment, tipping back and forth on his heels, as if calculating, or struggling internally, his lips pursed. Then, his eyes closing, Shem raised an arm uncertainly. Manipulating the air again, he opened another gateway, onto a sprawling nexus of worlds, from which she’d been plucked. The frightening array displayed such cosmic power and depth that Valentina began to gasp and waver, as if she might fall into its immensity. She cried out in fear.

But Shem steadied her with his other hand. Then he banished all but a single world, out of that kaleidoscopic maelstrom, showing her, at last, an overhead view of the Fortress of the Dead. Opened…expanded into a bizarre figure of tenuously connected blocks that could not support itself in any normal spatial reference. Tiny figures moved therein, and Valentina inhaled a whistling breath to see it.

“Watch,” Shem told her, passing his hands before the construct in such a way as to reassemble it into a recognizable structure. It grew in the vista before her, now occluding the hillside view. “See how insignificant it appears from this vantage.”

And she did feel a sensation of headiness. For an instant Valentina was a goddess, overlooking a tiny castle in her thrall.

But at her side, Shem’s fair brow deepened and clouded over with a fatal realization.

* * * *

Within the fortress, the questing party found that suddenly normal, navigable space had returned. For whatever unfathomable reason, the magic had departed. Walls, doors and windows behaved truly, serving up visions of physical reality.

“Our advantage now,” Gonji told them through gritted teeth, once they had accepted the return of the reality they had known. “To the gatehouse, where Simon left Valentina, and Lola and the bird-woman!”

“Our advantage!” Buey echoed.

The small band of warriors moved off with renewed determination.

But then, with the colossal upheaval that ensued, shattering all physical boundaries and driving them to the brink of madness, it was suddenly
no one’s
advantage.

* * * *

Valentina gulped and recovered her senses. She turned from her view of the Fortress and snapped Shem from his own disquieting vision.

“Shem, the
dead
pursue us. Kill us. Do you know how? Is there
anything
you can tell me that might help us against this sorcery?”

“Time suspension, perhaps,” he said simply, absently. “Yes. I can’t explain further, but yes, it’s possible.” He seemed to be intent on watching the castle a moment. Then: “Do you—do you have a lover among those doomed men?”

She was taken aback by the sudden candor. To see her blanching expression, Shem blushed, aware that he’d laid his soul bare. He looked awkward and uncomfortable. “I am sorry, I—”

“No, it’s all right. No, it’s…it’s funny, you see, I—I’m among the best friends I’ve ever had. People I’m willing to die for. But there’s none that I would call my lover, though I’ve called many men lovers when I wouldn’t have called them friends.” She snickered at the curious irony she’d uncovered. “I thought to give my flesh to
you
,
if it would have helped.” Her brow knit, now, to hear her own frankness, to see Shem avert his face in embarrassment. “But I wouldn’t have done that to you. Not to you. I—I have an affliction, you see…”

Shem looked back to her. Slowly, his expression opening to her, he moved nearer. He touched her hand. Understanding lit his deep blue eyes. “You are soiled, nothing more.” He smiled, as if comforting an unduly troubled child.

Valentina’s eyes went wide. She experienced a depth of embarrassment, to hear his words, that made her want to run. She drew back, but Shem took her hand again.

“Come with me. The child sleeps. Nothing can harm it here. This is the arch of the Architect-god himself. Once, legend tells us, it was the first he created. The first gateway by which beings of flesh and seeking mind might seek his bounty. The inscription read,
Et in Arcadia Ego…Sum—
‘And in Arcadia, I
am
.’
I will show you another.”

She went willingly, drawn by his gentle spell. They walked the hills for a time and through two gateways in which he bade her not to look about, lest she see things best withheld. She found herself complying, resisting her incidental curiosity in favor of a burning desire to reach their destination.

When they reached a second arch, this one undamaged, he translated its inscription:
And in Arcadia, I heal.

“
Elixir vitae
,”
Shem said, waving a hand over the lush garden that sprawled before a cataract of crystal-clear water. “Panacea for many ills of the human corpus.”

He plucked a yellow blossom and laid it on a cut on Valentina’s arm. There was an effervescent effect, and the wound’s lips began to shrink, to close, though the residue of dried blood remained. He drew the astonished woman toward a mossy bank and pointed.